I just finished reading Josh Kopelman’s blog post on the Implicit Web, and it got me thinking. This is probably the third or forth article I’ve read on the subject, and not surprisingly it comes from another VC. It seems the VCs are all hyped up about the possibilities behind using our Digital Footprints to better organize our life on the web.

Josh lays out some pretty nice examples of how we can take advantage of the Implicit Web. He uses the example of creating a profile for your Facebook account. Every thing we do on the web from buying Mother’s day gifts on Amazon to signing up for a social network leaves bits of information about us on the web, or in the clouds. When Facebook asks you what are your favorite movies, books, and music, instead of having to answer the questions Facebook should simply ask Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes what you’re favorite music is.

Now I see exactly why the VCs are getting so excited. Someone who could provide either a way of organizing the data from all of these different locations onto one massive database, or provide a way to properly organize and categorize the data from the other locations could really disrupt the way we currently browse the web. Not only the web, but technology tracks and records our actions everywhere in our life. Every time you use your credit card, the store you used it at and your bank has detailed records of those transactions. Organizing this sort of data for benevolent use could make our lives a lot easier.

Note the word benevolent there. For all of the good that can be done by organizing our digital footprints, twice as much bad can be done. And this is where I really start to get concerned. I still can’t understand Twitter, why do I want people to know what I’m doing all the time? I don’t know how I feel about such vast amounts of information about my personal life being organized into a way in which large companies can access it. Do I really want Facebook knowing what my favorites are, and what I purchase the most?

Along those lines, I think it is going to be absolutely crucial for the companies who step up to take advantage of the implicit web to have proper privacy implementations. The ability for the user to control what companies can and can’t record about themselves will be crucial to the success of said technologies. Without such control, we’re talking some major Big Brother issues.

Why is finding housing soo hard? I think its the same reason I’m no good at clothes shopping, too much variety and I don’t know what the hell I like. I’m trying to find a 2-3 bedroom in either Northern Liberties or along South St. and surprisingly I’ve found a TON of listings in my price range. My number one priority is public transportation since I don’t have a car, which narrows down my search a little bit.

Craigslist search is garbage, it filters just about as well as a fishnet filters water. I’d love to see someone put together a user controlled site for real estate, sort of Digg meets Craiglist meets Trends. It’d be really cool to have listings that you can vote on or vote down, and a comment section to comment on listings. Comments on the quality of the area, trustworthyness of the realators, etc. How about some easy search filters like within a specific number of blocks/miles to public transportation, and a search engine that when I type in South St, I get South St and not the 2500 block of South Broad. Who knows maybe I’ll turn my brainstorm into a reality, or better yet someone will read it and make it happen.

In the meantime, anyone have any recommendations on nice/cheap places to live in or around Center City Philadelphia and close to public transpo??

Chris and I have been working closely with our school’s entrepreneurship center on developing DGA and trying to raise capital. They’ve been a world of help in regards to mentorship and consultation, and one of their first recommendations was that we register for a series of Business Plan competitions that Drexel offers. I think Chris was a bit more into it than me… I couldn’t really see the value, until now. Check out my post on blogDGA to get a little more information about the latest competition.

We haven’t done so well in the first two competitions (Business Concept and Business Plan), but I am confident that this upcoming event will be extremely valuable. The chance to pitch our plan in front of a focused group of relevant industry professionals and have them tear into us is something I’ve been dying for. I’ve practiced by elevator and cab pitch time and time again and have finally gotten to a point where I’m not only overly passionate about my topic, but comfortable conveying our ideas and concepts to a variety of different people. But I haven’t had any real public speaking practice and now’s my chance. I couldn’t ask for a better audience and I plan on taking full advantage of this opportunity.

I’ve always been extremely social and comfortable in any business environment, and the only one I have yet to explore is public speaking. A lot of the people I respect the most in the industry and Philadelphia region regularly give speeches and presentations during relevant conferences and organizations, and its something I have always looked up to. I cannot wait until I am in a position to speak on behalf of a topic to a group of colleagues and peers and actually be able to offer some sort of value to them.

Just wanted to give a quick post regarding Devnuts.com, our new web development company. Devnuts is basically a merger of web development companies between Chris Alfano, Eric Zhivalyuk, and myself. The three of us are close friends and have worked together for just about the last 4 years and have all done business under a variety of our own business entities which got very confusing for us and our clients at times. Thus spawned Devnuts.

The idea first came up when we realized we were each turning down potentially thousands of dollars worth of projects because we didn’t have the time to take them on. It’s really frustrating to have to say no to someone looking for a website because you don’t have the time to work on it. The idea behind Devnuts is to provide us with a centralized company where we manage our projects more efficiently from a higher level, allowing us to take on a much greater volume of projects.

The three of us have 10 or so independent designers and coders who have worked for us in the past and we have brought them all along to Devnuts. Now when a project comes along that we may not personally have time to handle, we can delegate the necessary parts of the projects to our group of contractors. The idea is to provide a stream of constant work for our independent contractors and develop the Devnuts brand as well as each contractors personal portfolio. We are encouraging all of our contractors to use any of their Devnuts work on their personal portfolios, so they aren’t just doing work for a company that reaps all the rewards.

The idea is far from unique, but its something that’s gonna save us a great amount of time and effort, while still providing a steady stream of income for us and our employees. I’ve spent the past few weeks organizing the standards and protocols necessary to make this sort of thing a success and I’m proud to say as of today we are up and operational. We took on our first client as the new entity today, and have 2 incoming clients later in the week.

Lets hope Devnuts can churn out some nice incoming revenue so we can really start griding on some of the more fun projects we’ve got our hands on!

A few days ago I posted a video of Eric Schmidt answering the question “what is Web 3.0?” during a Q&A session at the Seoul Digital Forum. After making a crack at the phrase by calling it a marketing term he went on to discuss Web 3.0 as a “different way of building applications”. He goes into greater detail and his explanation is very concise and elegent, take a look for yourself.

I think that Eric Schmidt hit it right on the head. For years the technogods the likes of Larry Ellison have claimed the desktop is going to go virtual, killing the operating system entirely. This is something we are going to see take place at an extremely fast pace in the very near future. Applications are going to be gradually ported from desktop to web based, as the natural trend through the past year has shown us. I know personally, 3 years ago I was nothing without my desktop, and now I’m almost entirely virtual. Everything important to me is in the cloud, and I can access it on the go, wherever I’m at (with a few small exceptions).

Windows is going to be a thing of the past.  Web based platforms like Facebook have potential to virtually replace operating systems like windows. I’m not sure about you but If you’ve ever heard Mark Zuckerberg talk he sounds a lot like fellow Harvard dropout, Bill Gates. I don’t think that Zuckerberg will every be able to create the same type of dominance Gates was able to because of the infinite nature of the internet. Where Gates made people NEED his product, Zuckerberg will never be able to create that sort of demand. There will always be another startup that can offer an alternative to Facebook, and unlike with Windows the Internet makes it easy for the everyday user to take advantage of these options. This will promote good old fassion capitalistic competition, which will constantly force companies to offer their users a better product. Whoever can provide the most comfortable, convenient, and easy platform for its user will retain the biggest market share.

I think another trend we will see in the next wave of web technology will be a much larger presence of open source technology. Open source frameworks like Asterisk really open the door of possibilities for pioneering major industries such as the future of telephony infrastructure. Open source implementations in major infrastructure industries will eliminate a ton of the problems we currently deal with. The hassles of dealing with the phone company will be a thing of the past with proper open source implementations.

Imagine if MaBell made an effort to progress its technology for the sake of progress, and not financial gain. Maybe we wouldn’t be relying on the same exact telephony infrastructure our grandparents did. Open source communities have shown tremendous potential for advancing technology. I think it will be interesting to watch the progress of Asterisk, it could have some pretty profound impacts on our future.

I think in the immediate future we are going to see some pretty crazy advancements in the way of web-based video capture/conferencing. I remember watching movies 10 years ago where the actors communicated face to face via laptops and it was considered sci-fi and futuristic. Now my 15 year old sister video chats on the norm. iChat has already shown us some pretty amazing implementations of such technology, but I think we can expect a major shift to web based video conferencing software. Check out the Red5 project, it should make some considerable progress in this area. Sebastian Wagner has posted a really  promising piece of software that utilizes the Red5 framework called openmeeting on Google Code. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some Google/Yahoo aquisitions in the way of web-based video capture/conferencing/streaming in the near future.

I can’t sleep, I’ve been up researching/writing all night. I need to put together a solid presentation of my business pitch for DGA. Just brainstorming for now, will put the pen to the paper in the morning after the gym and a clear mind.

I  hit a vain in the entrepreneur/startup community in Philadelphia by stumbling upon Philly Startup Leaders yesterday. It has directed me onto a bunch of other really cool communities/projects in the Philadelphia area. The most interesting consortium being the SocialDevCamp East.

Check it out, it really caught my interest because of the idea of bringing a bit of the tech buzz on the West Coast to the East Coast so I sent it over to my roommate/colleague, Chris and we agreed we’d have to attend. Its in Baltimore, not too bad a commute, except one problem. It was 2 days ago. Horrendous timing, I’m really pissed. I really would like to step up my efforts to attending events like these, I think they are wonderful oppurtunities to network and collaborate with some of the brightest and most ambitious people in Philadelphia.

Ah wash is out of the dryer. Time for bed.

Check this quick video out. I thought it was very interesting.

I just picked up a copy of PC Magazine for the first time in years, and I was very very surprised. My memory of PC Mag is a bloated review magazine full of some great reviews, but impossible to navigate to the point of giving up. I have to be honest with you, when I read through this magazine I skipped the reviews, and instead headed straight for the columns. John C. Dvorak was cover material on the special edition “Green Issue”, and my purpose for picking up the magazine in the first place, so I headed straight for his article “Turn off the Lights!”.

I’m a huge fan of Dvorak so I was a bit biased going in, but after reading/loving his column I skimmed through the rest. First was an interesting article by Lance Ulanoff titled “Can We Stay Green?”. The article discussed the problem of not going green, but staying green. Once the media stops pumping us full of this newest fad we call “Going green”, are we really going to stay green, and follow through in our every day actions? It was a great read that really got me thinking about our culture today. Images of PC Monitor rivers, and landfill-slides like from Idiocracy stained my brain. But more importantly I was hooked, so I read on.

“Whats our 75-Year Tech Plan?” by Sascha Segan was the third article I read. It first proposed the issue of planning ahead by comparing our metro system with the French’s metro system and quoting its President saying something like “you need to plan more than just 5 years ahead, you need a 50, 75, 100 year plan!” Segan then lays out his ideas for an Infrastructure, Wireless, Transformative Technologies, and of course Energy Plans over the next 50-100 years. I love his thoughts, and I definitely recommend you check the article out yourself to avoid me rehashing.

The whole time I read the article I kept thinking about Obama. The things Segan talked about were the exact type of things Obama brings up over and over again. Obama has embraced the need to plan ahead, and the need to overhaul our technology infrastructure as is to ensure a better and more efficient future. Check out his one on one with Eric Schmidt from the @Google Talks. You think McCain knows what wireless spectrums are? Oops, enough political bashing, back to the point.

Those three articles alone was worth the price of purchase. I guess I always knew in the back of my head that Dvorak was a writer at PC Mag, and I guess I could have deduced that that meant PC Mag had some good reads, but I never gave it a chance. Magazine isn’t my medium of choice, but PC Mag just gained a new loyal web customer.

Web Communities

Anyone who spends more than a few hours a week on a computer has been bombarded by the overwhelming presence of community driven web sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The concept is far from new, communities have been developed to bring people together for centuries from 4H to Future Business Leaders of America.

The nature of our culture and society states that we prefer to be surrounded by people of similar beliefs and interests and the Internet has been the single most influential tool in our history for bringing people together in that exact fashion.

Web communities have demonstrated a substantial ability to bring together people of all backgrounds and beliefs. We’ve all seen web communities bring together entire towns during times of despair such as the tragic Virginia Tech shooting. Families have reunited after years without communication all because of a newborn baby picture posted online.

It is exactly this sort of power that makes community software unique from the rest of the breakthrough Internet technologies. It is exactly this sort of power that will be responsible for the future of the Internet as we know it.

Types of Communities

There are hundreds of thousands of communities out there and an infinite amount of variations, but for simplicity sake I will categorize them into 3 main types of communities: Social Networks, Supportive Communities, and Research communities.

Social Networks are perhaps the most familiar communities to the average computer user. MySpace, Facebook, and PureVolume are some of the larger examples out there that serve the purpose of bringing people together. MySpace and Facebook bring people together with the intention of networking and feeding people’s desires to be in contact with their friends. PureVolume also serves a more specific purpose of delivery an environment for musicians to be heard.  In the end these communities are developed from the ground up to be a social experience for its users.

Supportive communities, unlike social networks, are web communities that have been developed around an already existing community. This type of community may be as simple as the forums on which the local Rotary Club chapter frequents to discuss upcoming schedules and events, or as interactive as Amazon.com’s user review system.

Research communities are the least popular of the community types I will discuss, however quite probably the most important. These communities range from tech discussion forums for technical products and services to medical diagnosis and treatment repositories such as WebMD.

Potential

Each of these three communities has a tremendous amount of potential for its respective purposes. The first type of potential output is the most obvious; financial. Social networks especially have shown a considerable amount of potential for advertising revenue, the bread and butter of Web 2.0 if you will. The potential lies in its user base, the more users the more valuable advertising space within the content of that community is.

Google’s proven ad revenue model is a perfect measure of how effective web advertising per audience actually is.  In the case of Google they rely on complex algorithms to determine the most effective displays for specific advertisements. So for example, when a user searches for “soccer cleats” they will find advertisements relative to soccer and or footwear, not advertisements for home improvements.
The beauty in advertising through web communities is that by nature of the network the demographics are predefined. So when a web community for home improvement enthusiasts wants to offer adspace they will be able to provide the perfect demographic for a company like Lowes, and a not so ideal demographic for a company like Disney.

There are far more benefits than just financial from developing web communities. Supportive communities can offer their existing communities a level of interaction and development not previously available. Amazon.com is a picture perfect example of this sort of implementation. Amazon had a proven business model, and the development of a community around that model has been paramount to its success.

Amazon created a community that allows its customers to write personalized product reviews and recommendations. The system gives its customers a whole new level of interactivity making their shopping easier, and their experience smoother. Other retailers can develop and strengthen their customer base through this type of supporting community at very little cost.
Discussing the potential for research based web communities is where things get really exciting. Research communities can provide a level of collaboration and cooperation that would be physically impossible if not for the power of the Internet. Imagine a community exclusive to qualified medical professionals, where they can discuss medical treatments, diagnosis’s, and future research.
The core of the community could be something as simple as a message board based for specific topics but its surrounding features would be crucial. Doctor’s would have their own personalized profiles including education, honors, awards, and degrees and may even go as far as their own personal beliefs and ideals. Personalization at this level serves not only as a verification tool, but also as a means of strengthening the bond the user feels with its community.

This type of bond is the essence of forming the community in the first place. Once a user feels truly a part of the community they are that much more likely to act towards the benefit of the community as a whole. Adding that level of personalization may be what existing research communities need to take it to the next level. The breakthrough medicinal discovery of the next decade could very well be the product of web community collaboration.

Developers

I expect the next few years will lay wake to an explosion of community software and social networks. As these networks continue to develop and grow dilution is going to be an obvious issue. The more communities out there asking for users’ loyalty the less likely any one user is to actually commit to a community. It is that rationale that should fuel community developers to make the process of joining and partaking in a community as simple and painless as possible.

For example users aren’t going to be interested in recreating their personal profiles for each community they wish to join. We’ve already seen companies begin to address this issue such as Google’s Open Social and OpenID.  These services plan to address the issue of standardization across multiple communities for the benefit of its users. Under these new systems a user can have a single profile that can be imported into any community that user wishes to join without the need to recreate his/her profile per community.

Developers need to spend all of their effort designing their communities to offer as much to the user as possible while asking for as little as possible in return. Generally the more commitment a community requires from a user the less likely the user is to commit. Anything from registration forms to community bulletins need to be as short and concise as possible while offering the most to its users. Ryan Singer from 37 Signals gave a conference speech on this exact sort of theory of implementation for web developers, you can check it out here.

Well I think that’s enough for today, I’d hate to write a conclusion because I’m not finished. It’s a blog, so I’m sure I’ll pick up where I left off sometime soon, until then… Thanks for listening!